Render to RIB compatibility with renderman
arunp
Posts: 5
Hi,
I know render to RIB is render man compliant. Does the exported rib file runs without any issue/change with renderman renderer?
-A
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We will find out when Renderman becomes available for free -- Which is supposed to be sometime soon.
There is a free stand alone version of 3Delight, the render engine that DS uses, and there are numerous threads on the forums about using it with RIB files.
http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php?page=3DSP_download
The .rib file is renderman compliant but the exported shaders aren't. The last time I tried to render with something other than 3Delight (which was long ago) you could render the geometry only.
It likely wouldn't work out of the box, something would need to make a conversion for the surfaces to be redefined from 3Delight for Renderman. Your surface pane in Studio is really a throttled back interface for 3Delight shaders that are in most instances exclusive to 3Delight so they would need to be compiled for Renderman out of Studio by a bridge program (preferably with a UI because software "guessing" is probably not going to give you the results your looking for). While 3Delight is Renderman compliant the shader sets are probably very different.
Paolo at preta3d.com has hinted he might build something to do this but I'm sure he wont be the only one. Lets hope Pixar doesn't delay releasing free Renderman again.
What if the shaders in DAZ Studio were limited to the Basic Shader (no SSS, UberLight, UberSurface, etc)? Would they work in RenderMan?
The uber shaders are proprietary, and the the standard DAZ shaders also contain three or four proprietary functions. But the standard renderman format (Renderman Shading Language) is source code, so exporting them in that format would reveal the code, and that might be the reason they originally decided not to do it. In one older DAZ function that they did provide source code for there's a comment that says "don't disclose this code."
It might be possible to write code to extract the non-proprietary parts of the shaders and just write replacements for the proprietary blocks, and that seems like it could be easier than converting surfaces to LuxRender because the DAZ shader code is already in RSL under the hood. That would work for a lot of custom shaders too (like AoA subsurface) since they also just consist of RSL plus the few DAZ proprietary functions.
By the way there's a free script called mjcteleblender (I think) that claims to convert DAZ surfaces to blender format. I don't know if you can go from blender to renderman.
It converts to blender cycles, which is not Renderman compliant
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.61/Cycles
It also helps if you can navigate your way around the Blender interface somewhat which is far easier said than done if you'v never used Blender before.
It converts to blender cycles, which is not Renderman compliant
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.61/Cycles
It also helps if you can navigate your way around the Blender interface somewhat which is far easier said than done if you'v never used Blender before.
I use mcjTelebelnder quite a bit, since I use Cycles as my Renderer. In fact, I have even modified it to suit my needs. I think what is needed (in addition to a geometry exporter) is a utility to export "common" DAZ Material settings in a "standard" format such as JSON, so they can be read and interpreted by any importer.
By the way, what are people trying to get by exporting to renderman? Different renderman-compliant renderers might differ in the way they do some things like antialiasing, but if you were to successfully transfer a daz scene to renderman, by and large you should expect to get the same render.
On the other hand if you replaced some or all of the DAZ shaders with some of the cool proprietary ones renderman seems to have, that could make a big difference.
Depending on what is available to you by use by the exporter.
Even 3Delight is capable of a much more sophisticated set with tools that we currently have in Studio, I assume this is to keep it simple for our needs but if you've ever seen what 3Delight is capable of (Harry Potter, Zero Dark Thirty) it's a very professional toolset. I'm surprised no one has introduced a interface extension that taps into this similar to Reality or Luxus. We do have UberEnviornment, Atmospheric Cameras, Lighting Systems and Surface Shaders, etc., that begin to utilize some of this but it's still mostly untapped and probably outside of our comfort zone to understand how to use effectively.
Depending on what is available to you by use by the exporter.
Even 3Delight is capable of a much more sophisticated set with tools that we currently have in Studio, I assume this is to keep it simple for our needs but if you've ever seen what 3Delight is capable of (Harry Potter, Zero Dark Thirty) it's a very professional toolset. I'm surprised no one has introduced a interface extension that taps into this similar to Reality or Luxus. We do have UberEnviornment, Atmospheric Cameras, Lighting Systems and Surface Shaders, etc., that begin to utilize some of this but it's still mostly untapped and probably outside of our comfort zone to understand how to use effectively.
There is an interface extension, it's buried in an obscure corner of the shader builder. (Open any arbitrary shader and right click Functions>User in the block repository tab). But even with all the shader code available online, I'll never be as good as people who are paid to do it full-time and were good enough to begin with that someone would pay them for that. Pixar seems to be saying that a bunch of cool proprietary shaders will be included in the release.